2021 Elections: Democrats Defeated — Corporate Media Blames the Left

DSA and the Left need to distance themselves much more from the Democrats: Let’s revive the Dirty Break Strategy

By Brandon Madsen and Stephan Kimmerle

CNN’s conclusion came fast. The morning after a crushing defeat for Biden’s Democrats in the 2021 November elections, the liberal media giant’s homepage was emblazoned with the headline: “Democrats misjudged the nation’s mood.”

The New York Times Politics editor, Blake Hounshell, reported “Some in Biden-land are already asking themselves if the president has allowed himself to be tugged too far to the left while in office, and those voices are likely to get louder now.”

The New York Times Editorial Board stated that “what is badly needed, is an honest conversation in the Democratic Party about how to return to the moderate policies and values that fueled the blue-wave victories in 2018 and won Joe Biden the presidency in 2020.” Somehow they failed to mention that the Democrat who lost in the race for Virginia’s governor – Terry McAuliffe – is a posterboy for the corporate Democrats. McAuliffe, who defeated progressive challengers in the Democratic primary, succeeded in losing the general election race to his Republican challenger in a state that Biden won by ten percentage points only one year ago. 

In New Jersey, the Democratic governor Phil Murphy won re-election by the tiniest of margins, despite Biden winning the state in 2020 by 16 points. Murphy, a super-rich former Goldman Sachs banker, is certainly no acolyte of Bernie Sanders. Meanwhile, the even more centrist Democratic State Senate leader in New Jersey, Steve Sweeney, “lost to a Republican truck driver whose campaign worked with a shoestring budget” (New York Times).

Still, the thesis promoted by CNN and the New York Times is: the Democrats have overreached with left policies that go far beyond their limited mandate from the 2020 elections. 

We are told that the Democrats’ promises caused the party’s defeat rather than the breaking of those promises.

Yet the reality is that for the majority of voters the Democrats have failed to deliver significant improvements in their lives since becoming the governing party ruling over all of Washington DC.  Biden promised a “return to normal” but the Covid pandemic continues, with Delta leading to a marked slowing down of the economy in the 3rd quarter to only a 2 percent increase. Meanwhile inflation is hitting working people’s pocket books, resulting in real wages falling behind.

The result? 63 percent of Americans think the country is heading in the wrong direction in the October 16 to November 2 RCP polling average. Biden’s approval ratings have fallen to 43 percent, with 51 percent disapproving – the second lowest in modern polling history for any president at this stage in their first term. (The one president less popular than Biden was Trump.)

The fact is that the Democrats have failed to deliver on most of their popular promises that would significantly improve regular people’s lives. These include:

• Raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour
• 12 weeks of paid family leave
• Free universal pre-school
• Free community college
• Making healthcare more affordable by having Medicare cover vision, dental, and hearing, lowering the Medicare eligibility age, and reducing the cost of prescription drugs
• Canceling student debt
• Tackling climate change
• Safeguarding voting rights which are especially under attack in BIPOC communities
• Expanding workers’ rights with the PRO Act 

Defenders of Biden will point to his efforts to include much of this in his “reconciliation” package. But the fact remains that Biden has not succeeded in actually passing this agenda, which is what counts for the majority of voters.

Senator Joe Manchin – who, together with Kyrsten Sinema and the Republican politicians, have been the main roadblock to get anything in the promised agenda passed. And Manchin has been playing hard ball. Even before election night, he demanded that the bipartisan infrastructure bill (a significant portion of which is composed of corporate subsidies and climate-killing programs), should be passed by the House of Representatives without the reconciliation package (which includes climate justice elements, childcare provisions, and healthcare expansions) even being voted on in the Senate. In the end, the so called “progressive caucus” surrendered and accepted to vote on the infrastructure bill without passing the reconciliation package as well. Only the Squad (Cori Bush, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman) voted against it.

On the current trajectory, it is clear that the Democrats will lose the 2022 midterm elections, likely losing their majorities in both chambers of Congress. 

A Sober View from the Left on the Elections

A sober view from a democratic socialist point of view reveals a mixed bag with the Republicans making gains overall. In a number of cases, a low voter turnout, particularly among young people and other core left-leaning voting groups, allowed Republicans and so-called “moderate” (meaning staunchly pro-corporate) Democrats to make gains. Elsewhere, such as in Virginia and New Jersey, there was relatively high turnout, but this was driven by Republican anger towards Biden, as well as by some polarization over public school policies and racial issues. 

In general, the low approval ratings for Biden and the disappointments over how little Democrats have delivered were the biggest burdens hanging over the elections for the Democrats (both left-wing and conservative). 

A number of DSA-endorsed candidates won their elections, but some of the most significant ones were lost. (See this overview, put together by Metro DC DSA, for a summary of how nationally endorsed candidates fared in 2021.) 

The highest-profile election for DSA was India Walton’s bid for mayor in Buffalo, New York. After winning against the pro-corporate incumbent (Byron Brown) in the Democratic primary, Walton was still confronted with the real power of that pro-capitalist party machine working against her. Big business and key sections of the party establishment backed Brown’s aggressive write-in campaign in the general, catapulting them to a decisive victory on election night. These “moderate” Democrats made no visible effort to denounce or reject the help of Republicans, who sent out mailers calling on voters to write in Brown to stop the scary socialist. All the talk about how dangerous and Trumpian the Republicans are ends when the aim is to defeat the Democratic Party’s own left wing. 

How often have left candidates who lost in the Democratic primaries been warned and lectured about the need to unite and to accept the outcome? As their treatment of Walton shows, the “moderate” wing of the Democrats does not shy away from breaking all those supposed rules of their party and still running independently if they lose a primary. DSA and the Left need to learn from this experience and be willing, where viable, to continue running in general elections rather than endorsing pro-corporate Democrats.

In Somerville, Massachusetts, DSA was involved in an exciting campaign to fight for a pro-worker majority on the council. Four of the seven DSA candidates won their races. Eve Seitchik, former Boston DSA Co-chair and member of DSA’s Reform & Revolution caucus – was unfortunately not elected. Eve came in a close fifth in an at-large election where seats go to the top four candidates. Eve boldly campaigned as an independent democratic socialist, not as a Democrat, and put forward a vision to build affordable housing and slash the bloated police budget to fund community needs. The radical edge of Eve’s campaign likely did not go unnoticed, as evidenced by Representative Ayanna Pressley withholding her endorsement from the Seitchik campaign even while backing other DSA city council candidates. 

In Florida, DSA candidate Richie Floyd ran a victorious St. Petersburg city council campaign linked to building working-class power and organizing people in DSA. 

Robin Wonsley Worlobah – BLM organizer, leader of the local $15 per hour minimum wage victory, and outspoken socialist, won a close five-way race with 29 percent in the first round and holding onto her early lead by just 19 votes and 42.6 percent after all three rounds were counted. Robin’s campaign stands out especially for her decision to run as an independent, not a Democrat. She won as an independent socialist in a partisan election where party affiliation is on the ballot – contradicting claims that independent socialists can only win in non-partisan races. Two other DSA-endorsed candidates also won city council election victories in Minneapolis: Aisha Chughtai in Ward 10 and Jason Chavez (by a decisive margin) in Ward 9. 

With three DSA members now on the Minneapolis City Council (out of 13 in total), DSA and the Left have a big opportunity to offer a left-wing opposition to the corporate Democrats. It is vital that the three DSA members, rather than acting as individuals, work as an open socialist caucus which can project a generalized socialist profile and message. This must be linked with bold socialist policies and a movement-building orientation. The same applies to other areas where DSA now has a block of representatives such as the New York City Council and the New York State government, where good steps have been taken along these lines. This would be a key step in DSA acting as a party-like organization and moving toward a dirty break with the Democratic Party.

Ballot initiatives had mixed results. One and a half years after the murder of George Floyd and the mass protests for Black Lives, a citywide ballot initiative to dissolve the Minneapolis Police Department and replace it with a new City department for Public Safety was not successful. However, the same electorate approved a ballot initiative to allow City Hall to implement rent control. In neighboring St. Paul, voters approved a strong rent-control initiative that caps rent hikes at three percent per year, with no exceptions for changes in occupancy – making it one of the strictest rent-control policies in the country.

Another victory was in Austin, Texas where a right-wing initiative to increase funding for the police and cut funds for other vital public services was decisively defeated.

Four  Challenges

Overall there seem to be at least four main features that warrant closer examination and discussion. In brief, these include: 

1) The Democratic Party disappoints voters – again. Democrats systematically demoralized their voters. The portion of young people who showed up to the polls was low.

2) Crime and public safety matter – even if the left doesn’t like it. Rising crime was a major issue, and the right was able to seize on this to push back against the huge inroads made by the BLM movement last year.

3) Establishment liberals signal plans to shift right. Before, during, and after these elections, the liberal and conservative mass media have been consistently spinning the narrative that Democrats need to move to the right. DSA needs to organize to resist this. 

4) DSA and the wider left are struggling to find their place in the post-Trump era. So far under Biden there has been no mass social mobilization from the left: not against the abortion ban in Texas, nor in support of Bernie Sanders’ efforts in the budget reconciliation bill. Left leaders like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave great speeches, but had a sole focus on Congressional maneuvers and backroom negotiation strategies. There has been an important surge in workers strikes, but this still remains low by historical standards.

1)  Democratic Disappointment – Again

Unfortunately, DSA failed at its August 2021 convention to take any further steps to prepare the ground for a future break with the pro-capitalist Democratic Party. Instead, DSA essentially doubled down on its current strategy of using the Democratic Party ballot line, moving away from the 2019 conventions target of a “dirty break.” 

The 2021 election, and especially the example of India Walton’s race, provides a fresh crop of evidence as to the inadequacy of the current approach and the need to strive for sharper differentiation and political independence.  It is undoubtedly true that running  democratic socialists within Democratic primaries sometimes allows us to win public positions from which we can promote and popularize socialist ideas. What it does not allow us to do, however, is pick up and wield the Democratic Party machine for our own purposes. 

The cross-class, big-tent character of the Democratic Party is only sustainable on the basis of its left-wing accepting its subordination to corporate interests.

Much like the attempted DSA takeover of the party in Nevada demonstrated previously, the case of India Walton again underlines this harsh reality: Walton winning the Democratic primary did virtually nothing to stop key sections of the party establishment, along with big business and the mass media, from putting its weight behind the pro-corporate candidate anyway. As both experiences demonstrate, the real underlying party machine is not controlled by the results of internal party elections. The Democratic Party is not an empty vessel whose political content is determined by the outcomes of primaries or even the party’s internally elected bodies; it is a class organization representing capital. 

Brown running in the general election shows that if the left succeeds in taking over key parts of the Democratic Party it will trigger a split. The right wing of the party will never peacefully accept when the left takes over. The cross-class, big-tent character of the Democratic Party is only sustainable on the basis of its left-wing accepting its subordination to corporate interests. If the left gains the upper hand, the cross-class alliance breaks up, and the right wing, in essence, forms a new party to continue their efforts. This is what happened in microcosm in the Walton/Brown race and in Nevada. 

This all highlights a central issue for our side: There is no way for working-class and socialist activists to stand up against this center of power within the Democratic Party without our own political and organizational apparatus – in other words, our own party. 

We need to openly defend the horizon of building towards a mass working-class party. We need to be clear within DSA – and make it clear to the wider layers that currently support and vote for DSA candidates – that a split with the corporate interests in the Democratic Party is coming and we are working towards the goal of our own mass working-class party. This does not in any way prevent us from being flexible in our tactics today – including the ballot line question – taking into account the current balance of forces, and trying to connect with the current consciousness of working people. But we need to be clear and intentional about where our movement is heading, and about the tasks ahead. 

2) Crime and Safety Matter – Even If the Left Doesn’t Like It

We are living in a polarized society marked by ostentatious wealth and appalling poverty, infused with racism and sexism, rife with heterosexism and anti-trans hate crimes – in short, a pressure cooker packed full of social tensions, always on the brink of a potential explosion. Amid such instability, the need for safety is felt by all people, including working-class people and BIPOC communities. Like so many other basic needs in this society, this need often goes unmet. 

The demands to demilitarize and cut police budgets are 100 percent correct and necessary. Police in the US currently have bloated budgets and are armed to the teeth. For many of the most vulnerable in society, they are yet another life-threatening danger. 

From a socialist standpoint, a huge number of those currently in jail should be immediately released – for example, all who are imprisoned based on drug possession or other non-violent offenses. The US carceral system also systematically overpolices BIPOC and poor people. For these reasons and others, the goal of socialists must be to completely dismantle the current police and prison framework. However, it’s clear that on the way there, we will still need to provide for public safety in working-class communities.

The left is still faced with the challenge of how to win over a majority of the public to its position. Abolitionist slogans did not help to win those majorities, not even among BIPOC communities beyond the activist layer. 

The Left in general (and DSA in particular) need to chart a viable path capable of navigating the movement through the treacherous waters that separate the struggles of today from a future world without poverty, racism, and repression (that means where there is no longer any need or purpose for police and prisons). 

Most comrades in DSA would likely agree that to get rid of the police completely we need to establish things like free, high-quality health care for all that includes mental health; guaranteed affordable housing for all; good, union jobs for all; comprehensive social services, including drug treatment; reparations to BIPOC people; and a fundamental transformation of society to overcome the harm of centuries of genocide, slavery, racism, and oppression. 

While in the process of fundamentally transforming public safety away from a racist, oppressive, punitive system towards one based on prevention, social equity, repair, and rehabilitation, in some cases the appropriate intervention may still include imprisonment. 

Some examples where this may be appropriate and necessary are for those who carry out murders and other violent acts on behalf of organized crime syndicates; those who commit homicide or violent assaults and are deemed to be a continuing threat to communities; or cases of domestic violence and sexual assault. 

White supremacists like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, or the terrorists who murdered nine African-American people in the Charleston church shooting in 2015 need to be arrested and imprisoned until society is confident they no longer pose a threat of further violence or terrorist activity. 

None of this contradicts that the number of people who legitimately need to be imprisoned for crimes that represent a genuine social threat is drastically less than the current abomination known as the US “criminal justice system.” 

Further, even those whom society genuinely needs to detain should be treated in a fully humane fashion in a system geared towards repair and rehabilitation rather than the racist, violent, dehumanizing carceral regime in the US (which is in fact counterproductive from a public safety standpoint by fueling cycles of violence and recidivism, though politically necessary for the ruling class in this inhumane system). 

We must also be realistic with ourselves and others about the ferocious capitalist and right-wing opposition that a democratic socialist government will face as it seeks to implement those programs of social welfare and justice that are needed to create a society where police and prisons are no longer necessary. The January 6th attack on the US Capitol was not backed by any significant section of the ruling class (which is one reason among many why there was never any serious threat of a “coup”). If a socialist government came to power, however, it is virtually guaranteed that a significant section of capital would view the Proud Boys and other violent far-right groups as the lesser evil, compared with the socialist Left. These sections of the ruling class would actively attempt to employ the right-wing extremists as attack dogs against a socialist administration, letting them fully off the leash to brutally destroy organs of working-class democracy and to sow general pandemonium to undermine the government.  

A democratic socialist government will need to take decisive measures to protect society by forcefully shutting down these sorts of undemocratic, violent forces. This will include the need to arrest and detain violent white supremacists and other far-right forces, or elements in the military, police, and state machine who work to violently overthrow a democratic socialist government. To be clear: the current capitalist state and its forces cannot be used to defend such a government. Completely new structures are needed – democratic structures built from below by working-class people, based out of labor and social movements.

That does not erase our vision of a society without such needs, where such problems are a thing of the past. But DSA and the rest of the left need to grapple with those needs here and now instead of oversimplifying the situation, as the newly established DSA Platform does when it says: “Each step forward in reducing the size, power, and authority of the repressive forces of the state expands the space for mass, organized, and collective action of the working class, and clears ground for us to build the institutions of a society to serve our communities with real justice and equality.”

It is obvious to most working-class and oppressed people that even if 100 percent of all local police budgets in the country were redirected toward programs of social uplift, this would still not provide anywhere near the level of resources required to achieve a society based on social security and economic safety that can deal with antisocial behavior in a humane way. 

For example, even if we take the complete $400 million annual budget of the Seattle Police Department, we will not even be close to the amount of investment needed to solve homelessness and end poverty in the area. Clearly, we will have to do much more than just redirect police and prison spending. Fortunately, there are plenty of other, much larger pools of resources to draw from. 

The amount of wealth in the hands of the one percent is truly staggering. There is so much productive capacity being held hostage today for the profits of large corporations that it strains one’s powers of imagination to try to grasp it. The repurposing of this wealth and productive capacity has the potential to completely transform the conditions of existence for humanity on this planet. We absolutely can establish a society based on economic, gender and racial justice, based on solidarity and cooperation. But many voters clearly feared the left would succeed at defunding the police without simultaneously solving poverty and the root causes of their public safety concerns. 

DSA needs to have real debate on these topics, and ultimately it needs a clear recognition that in order to implement a socialist agenda, the capitalist state will need to be abolished and replaced with a thoroughly democratic state based on the conscious organized power of the working class.  

3) Withstanding a Shift to the Right

Based on these election results, many Democratic Party politicians will conclude that they have to move to the right. Unless DSA explicitly distances itself from the Democratic Party, and unless it promotes independent mobilizations from below to defend workers, women, trans people, and BIPOC communities from attacks on their rights, the hard-won progress achieved by democratic socialists over the last several years might slip through their fingers like grains of sand. 

This is the time for clear leadership from DSA’s National Political Committee, a time to call on our elected representatives and local movement leaders to organize mass resistance. Is it more complicated and difficult to do this now than under Trump? Absolutely. Nonetheless, it still has to be done. 

4) DSA and the Left Struggle to Find Their Place in the Post-Trump Era

Tens of thousands took to the streets on October 2 to protest the Texas abortion ban. However, this was still not enough to force larger feminist organizations like Planned Parenthood or NOW to go all-in and help to build a broader movement. There is a lot of anger, but it is not yet strong enough to trigger larger and more sustained mobilizations capable of rousing currently inactive layers of the population into active struggle.

Unfortunately, the sections of the left that may have had the power to help overcome this – including DSA – made no serious attempt to do so. When the Supreme Court allowed the Texas abortion ban to come into effect, there were neither generalized calls for protest nor immediate response mobilizations from most of the left. 

This example is illustrative of a larger picture: social mobilizations are currently at a low ebb. This might not last for long, but that in no way curtails the significant impact it is having on the situation right now. 

“Striketober” – the recent growth of strike action and increased militancy of workers in some industries – had a certain impact, but the level of worker struggle remains quite low by historical standards, and this uptick has not been enough to significantly alter the balance of power in the US so far.

The pay of workers in most industries has struggled to keep up with inflation, which has now reached five percent, resulting in the erosion of real wages. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has left it to Republicans to claim this as a talking point. Democrats gave an empty and completely insufficient answer that this “is only temporary” and failed to pass even the increasingly inadequate $15 per hour minimum wage that they had promised. Other measures vitally necessary to address the inflation hitting working-class pocketbooks include rent control, canceling student debt, and childcare, college, public transit, and publicly funded universal health care that is free at point of use.

Bernie Sanders and AOC have also not provided the necessary leadership to try to overcome the current lull in movements. If they, in coordination with grassroots organizations, had called for rallies of tens of thousands to support their vision of the reconciliation package, there’s little doubt that at least in bigger cities successful rallies would have taken place. That could have tested the water for larger protests – ones with a realistic shot at changing the balance of forces. In the end, left leaders like Bernie Sanders and AOC gave great speeches, but unfortunately their focus was on Congressional maneuvers and backroom negotiations. Overall, as is usually the case, this narrow parliamentary strategy proved ineffective. 

Re-energize the Left and Build Toward a Dirty Break

Almost a year into the Democrats running the national government the results are painfully clear. Their rule has systematically demoralized left-wing, younger, poorer, working class, and BIPOC voters. Nor is there a simple way forward by DSA focusing on local elections. Left candidates in local elections face a politically terrain largely shaped by the Democrats’ failures on the national level.

DSA candidates need to differentiate themselves much more from the Democratic Party or else the socialist movement will be discredited by its association with the Democratic Party and its failures.

The conservative wing of the Democratic Party is now trying to seize on the poor election performance to justify moving to the right. Again from the editorial board of the New York Times: 

Many in the president’s party point to Tuesday as proof that congressional Democrats need to stop their left-center squabbling and clock some legislative wins ASAP by passing both the bipartisan infrastructure bill and a robust version of the Build Back Better plan, the larger social spending and environmental proposal. They believe this will give their candidates concrete achievements to run on next year and help re-energize their base. But Tuesday’s results are a sign that significant parts of the electorate are feeling leery of a sharp leftward push in the party, including on priorities like Build Back Better, which have some strong provisions and some discretionary ones driving up the price tag. The concerns of more centrist Americans about a rush to spend taxpayer money, a rush to grow the government, should not be dismissed.

This is the challenge for DSA and the left: Each and every first step to take on climate change, to fight child poverty, to expand healthcare and so on needs to be fought through not just against Republican obstruction, but the core of the machine that runs the Democratic Party, and the power of the capitalist class that stands behind both parties and the mass media.  

DSA needs to change its direction and actively work toward a “dirty break.” As formulated by Reform & Revolution, this means: 

…that socialists can choose the tactic of running on the Democratic ballot line, provided that they maintain a clear socialist political profile and program, raise money independently from working-class people, and build independent working-class and left-wing organizations (and not the Democratic Party itself) in the course of the campaign.  …[T]his tactic can serve to build the working-class base for socialist politics that is necessary to carry out a successful break from the Democratic Party and form a new party at the right moment. 

We heard a lot of talk at this year’s national DSA convention about the great successes that socialists achieved on the Democratic ballot line. While this has led to advances for DSA in terms of winning electoral positions that we can use to gain short-term tactical advantages, it’s completely insufficient for a medium-term strategy. 

We in DSA – starting first and foremost with those candidates who have chosen to run on the Democratic Party ballot line – need to draw a clear line between ourselves and the pro-capitalist Democratic Party. This is the only realistic way DSA can guard against the demoralizing impact of being associated with this pro-capitalist party.